About that Pill…

This is a very interesting article about the Pill. It describes how the Pill deceives women, in spite of being applauded as this great liberator. The author describes, rather factually, how the Pill denies women very concrete information about our cycles and how our bodies work. It deceives some women into thinking they have no physical problems with their cycle, when in fact the Pill merely masks symptoms, and any underlying physical problems remain. Finally, it gives women a false sense of confidence that their fertility will last forever. The good news is that many women are catching on to the deceit:

…[W]omen are half-consciously rebelling against the artificiality of the Pill’s regime. Removal from one’s true biological processes was more appealing in the Mad Men era, when machines were going to save the world and pills could fix everything, even the ennui of housewives. But for the wheatgrass-and-yoga generation, there’s something about taking a pill every day that’s insulting to one’s sense of self, as an accomplished, adult woman. “I feel like I’ve gotten a message over the years that the less I have to do with the nitty-gritty biological stuff of being a woman, the better, and that’s a weird message,” says Sophia, 35, who was on the Pill for fourteen years. “In my ninth-grade health class, I remember the teacher saying, ‘You can get pregnant any day of the month, so always use protection,’ and I kind of knew that wasn’t true, but because I was on the Pill, I never really cared about finding out the right answer. The Pill takes a certain knowledge away from you, and that knowledge is empowering.”

One weakness of the article is that it tries to say there are no physical side effects, which isn’t true, but then, this article is more about the cultural side of how the Pill affects women’s choices. Worth the (long) read, particularly when we have some public health nurses and doctors declaring the very best thing we can do is get every teenage girl on the Pill.

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